Wednesday, 14 September 2016

Welcome
to August on Planet Hugill, a month which has seen us visiting Santa Fe
(New Mexico), Iceland and Tallinn (Estonia), and managing to
incorporate operas and concerts in each visit, of which more below.

Santa Fe Opera

The operas of Richard Strauss have always held a special place at Santa Fe and we saw Tim Albery's striking new production of Capriccio, whilst former husband and wife, Stephen Costello and Ailyn Pérez made a passionate pairing in Gounod's Roméo et Juliette in a production which channelled Gone with the Wind. We were lucky enough to be able to see the new production of Samuel Barber's Vanessa,
an opera we had never seen staged before, and here given in a handsome
Hollywood Noir production by James Robinson with Leonard Slatkin
conducting.

Birgitta Festival in Tallinn

The
Birgitta Festival takes place each Summer in the ruins of the Pirita
Convent in Tallinn, Estonia. I was lucky enough to attend this year and
amongst the visiting companies I heard the National Academic Bolshoi
Opera and Ballet of Belarus in Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, and the festival's own production, Joel Lauwers' Requiem... and life before, based on Mozart's Requiem.

Grimeborn Festival

Closer to home, at Grimeborn we caught a funny and very vivid production of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro, and Jack Cherry and Louis Mander's new operetta The Dowager's Oyster, a sort of cross between Agatha Christie and Sandy Wilson's Valmouth (speaking of which, isn't that wonderful piece about due for a revival).

Frankenstein

I am pleased to say that the video my own opera, The Genesis of Frankenstein,
which was premiered by the Helios Collective in October 2016, directed
by Ella Marchment, musical director Noah Mosley, has finally made it onto Vimeo.

Various Venues

We heard baritone Ricardo Panela in Duparc, Dvorak, and Piazzolla alongside composers from his native Portugal at St James's Church, Piccadilly, and Boxwood and Brass transcend the technical challenges in German harmoniemusik at the church of St Matthew in the Fields.

Book review

A cook book might seem an unlikely candidate to feature in this newsletter, but Cookery a la Carte is a very special book full of anecdotes, pictures and recipes from members of the D'Oyly Carte opera.

Interviews and articles

I talked to the soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn about her voice and recent roles in advance of her debut as Tosca in Magdeburg, and whilst in Santa Fe I was lucky enough to be able to interview Harry Bicket, who is chief conductor at Santa Fe.

Quickening:

Songs by Robert Hugill to texts by English and Welsh poets now available from Amazon

four delicate, sensitive settings of Ivor Gurney, drawing performances of like quality. - it is Rosalind Ventris’s viola, weaving its way around and between the voice and William Vann’s piano, that is most beguilingGramphone magazine Jan 2018